DISCOURSE OF EPIDEMICS AS A TRANSLATION PROBLEM

Medical translation and interpreting are often viewed as a field of collision for the discourse expectations, values and stereotypes of source and target culture representatives’ discourse behavior. However, the latter are deeply enmeshed in the discourse situation directly impacting their health and well-being, namely during the epidemic flare-ups, influx of contagious diseases etc. Under these conditions, the medical translator/interpreter is supposed to act as an information-sharing intermediary, a link between the experts (physicians, infectiologists, epidemiologists etc.) and non-experts (patients) whose mastery of an array of specialized information clusters demonstrates a culture-specific, contextual and lexico-semantic variation. Our study is aimed at revealing strategies and tactics of rendering epidemic–related medical texts’ discourse features, taking into account their universal and culture-specific linguosemiotic components, addressee’s pragmatic expectations, as well as domain-specific text-constructing norms and stereotypes of the recipient culture. Our study was performed on the material of 251 contexts of biomedical concepts belonging to the “epidemic” and “contagion” domains, among them 83 being in Ukrainian and 168 in English, along with their translation equivalents. Discourse of epidemics was proved to be a platform for realization of biomedical concepts with a pronounced emotive component. Moreover, comparative translation analysis of epidemic-related texts, oriented towards an unprofessional recipient, proves to be a tool of cross-cultural research as an emotive component has different representations in various cultures and gives rise to a number of texts and discourses marked with a transgeneric interference and adaptation. The adaptation’s final stage is assimilation, i.e. a complete subjugation of the generic and stylistic characteristics to the extant target audience’s expectations, or a generic transplantation, i.e. a transfer of generic norms from a source to a target culture.